People & Money
Jack Ma’s Ant Group Braces for the World’s Biggest Share Offering at $34 Billion
Ant Group, the financial technology firm owned by China’s richest man, Jack Ma, is on course to raising capital in excess of $34 billion in the world’s biggest initial public offering ever, valuing the business at $313 billion.
The Alibaba online spinoff, which provides the Chinese people a one-stop shop for loans, investments and more, on Monday set the price for its widely expected flotation and hopes to begin trading in early November, dwarfing state-owned Saudi Aramco’s record-breaking $25.6 billion public offer last December.
Ant, the parent of Alipay mobile payment service, priced its shares at about $10.30 apiece, according to documents issued on Monday by the stock exchanges in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where the fintech is hoping to dual-list.
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The firm, which has chosen to avoid US markets, stated that it is splitting its shares in equal proportion between the two stock markets and is looking to raise around $17.2 billion in each city.
The decision to bypass United States markets, which are already overwhelmed with tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, follows the escalating political and trade tensions between China and the U.S.
The Donald Trump administration has initiated a legislation that may compel Chinese firms to delist from U.S. markets should they fail to supply regulators with access to their audit reports.
Trump plans to force video sharing site Tik Tok owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, to sell off its U.S. unit to an American or face being shut down.
He says it constitutes a possible risk to national security given that the Chinese government could gain access to user data, an allegation Tik Tok’s parent company has rebutted.
The Trump administration has gone further to bar products and equipment from Huawei, the Chinese tech firm heavily involved in mobile phone networks around the world.
Details came up in July that pressure from the US government partly accounted for the reason the UK prevented Huawei from participation in the rollout of Britain’s 5G mobile phone network.
Ant, which is on course to raise over $25 billion its former parent Alibaba Group managed in flotation in 2014, is anticipated to commence trading on 5th November on Hong Kong’s technology-centred Star market. Alibaba, through its subsidiary Zhejiang Tmall Technology, has agreed to purchase 730 million A-shares to maintain its roughly 33% stake in Ant Group.
The fintech firm is controlled by Alibaba’s billionaire founder Jack Ma, who resigned as chairman of the company last September on his 55th birthday.
He started Alibaba in a one-room apartment 21 years ago and has vowed to cut its direct and indirect stakes in Ant Group to 8.8%.
Jack Ma is the 17th richest man in the world with a fortune said to be worth $61 billion by Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
